On no soul does God place a burden greater than it can bear. Every soul receives whatever it earns and is liable for whatever it does.

Q2:286

The backpacker is the one who acts on the invitation we all received, the one beckoning us into the heart of the wilderness.

What we mean by wilderness is in fact nature uninterpreted by man. It is creation not yet bent to the will of human society. It is the experience of God’s Will untrammeled, revelation without our self-serving influence.

Those insisting on mechanized transport are restricted to the periphery, merely sniffing at what the backpacker will savor. For as one plunges further into the untamed, the crowds thin and one moves ever closer toward that delicious dimension where rigor and beauty fuse.

The outlander breathes hard and deep here, perfusing her entire being with inspired awe and exhaling humility into the world.

Before we take to the wilds, we do an inventory, both personal and practical. We ask ourselves what we need, restricting our answers to what is actually necessary for the journey ahead. The curbing of our desires starts here, in honest inquiry.

Our bodies have rights. We must be fueled and hydrated. We require shelter from the elements. When we backpack, we limit our supplies to the fulfillment of those rights and nothing more.

The outlander does not pack to satisfy his emotional or psychological needs. There is great medicine for body, mind, and soul waiting for us in the wilderness and almost anything we bring will be inferior. We must trust in this until we have experienced it directly. Then we advise others accordingly:

Do Not Overpack

We have developed a strange relationship with comfort. Beyond seeking to make the difficult easy, we now see comfort as both the means and the end. We desire to achieve comfort comfortably.

We want everything and yet, we do nothing. We tell ourselves it’s because of how we were raised. We tell ourselves it’s because we were born different or that we didn’t have the same opportunities as everyone else. And so the trials and tribulations of the past become justifications for our sloth and avarice. We deny any personal responsibility in these setbacks because to do so would challenge the comfort we have made of our burden.

And this is the warm, paralyzing cocoon we fashion from the silken threads of blame and excuse.

We reject this poisonous swaddle. The outlander honors fate.

We may have been dealt a rough hand, but that only means we need to play it with masterful strategy. The outlander is cunning, eschewing convention and leveraging creativity to turn liabilities into assets.

But this takes work.

We insist on relentless forward progression. It is not required that our movement be rapid or even particularly determined apart from placing one foot in front of the other. Repeatedly. Automatically, and without ceasing until we have reached our resting place.

We are bound by physics. The energy required to start a thing is far greater than the energy required to keep it going. And so in starting, we must overcome our resting inertia. We need to fight our way from under the comfort creep that steals over us, inviting us to slip our packs off of our shoulders, to sit and to consider and to contemplate when what is necessary is that we move.

Once on the trail, it is better that we take advantage of our momentum and continue, no matter how slow, no matter how listless. We set our destination and we insist on moving until we arrive.

Breath and Light

We always have more in reserve than we allow ourselves to believe. We have lived so long in the overflowing abundance of God’s Grace that we have forgotten His Genius in fashioning us functional through both ease and difficulty. Now is our time to remember. We do not stop because of hardship. Rather, we adjust and proceed.

Our breathing sets the pace. If we cannot speak comfortably to our companions, if we cannot sing our prayers unbroken, then we are moving too fast. Our breath comes first and must never be outpaced.

We move, careful and deliberate if this is what is required, but we do not stop.

The hour before sunrise and the hour before sunset are our bookends. We must rise in darkness and rest while there is still light. Embedded within the predawn hour is a tremendous secret, the key to both material and mystical treasures. An early start puts the wind to our backs, moving us further and with greater ease than would otherwise be possible.

We meet the light as it is rising.

And we stop before it slips away.